Reporter's Diary

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34087, 26 February 1976, Page 3

Reporter's Diary

Spuds bagged THERE seem to be all kinds of ways of expressing one’s thanks for services voluntarily rendered. A couple of Marshland market gardeners have been mulling them over this week. The two men were chiefly involved in organising the centenary celebrations at the Marshland school last Sunday. For his efforts, one of the gardeners had a visit from the Polish Charge d’Affaires (Mr J. Bohdanowicz) who came bearing gifts and a touching letter of appreciation. The other gardener’s experience left him somewhat bereft of faith in human nature. For him the reward for a tremendous amount of effort was the theft of some of his property. He had provided 12 bags of potatoes worth about $2.90 each for the gardeners’ races. During the course of the afternoon six of the bags disappeared. One woman confided in the gardeners' wife (unaware of her identity) that her son had dared her to steal half a bag of potatoes and she had. The two gardeners thought they would like to thank the other people who left with four jugs, several glasses and sundry items of cutlery, all of which have to be paid for. It went thataway SALMON stories are running almost as thick and fast as the fish are this season. The latest comes from a Hororata woman who went fishing with her husband in the Upper Rakaia. On one of her first few casts she snagged in a big tangle of nylon someone had abandoned in the water —and when she put down her rod and began to disentangle her gear from it,

she found that on the other end there was a spinning lure, and on the lure there was a salmon, still very much alive. She couldn’t bring it in, so she gave the line to her husband, who “played” the fish for some minutes, while it jumped and threshed about the pool. But he lost it, and it’s still out there, with 20 or 30 yards of nylon in its mouth, waiting for the next taker. Too much A CORGl—one of the breed of pooches so beloved of the Royal Family—is recovering in Christchurch from a nervous breakdown. Wuffy was taken to Hagley Park to see the circus animals. He didn’t mind the monkeys, and he didn’t mind the elephants, but when an enormous balloon started whooshing hot air down upon him he just lay down on the grass and gave in to the monster. Wuffy was so terrified, said his owner, that he wouldn’t even walk. They had to make the baby get out of the push-chair and wheel the corgi home in it. Advertising A READER has given a novel reason for wanting to buy a copy of a photograph which appeared in “The Press” not long ago. The picture showed a truck at work, and the owner of the trucking firm has decided to have it reproduced on T-shirts for all of his employees. Rolls Royse

WHAT better symbol for selling skirts to the carriage trade than the distinctive outline of the Rolls Royce radiator. Unfortunately, the pattern designer of the skirts being sold in

one Christchurch shop could not be described as the Rolls Royce of spellers. All over the skirt, in embarrassingly big lettering, the name is spelled “Royse.” French lessons FRENCHMEN, especially the French police, have taken a great liking to the New Zealand jet boat. “The police use them to pick up swimmers who have raced out for a swim after a good lunch,” the former assistant trade commissioner in Paris, Mr Rod Cummings, said in Christchurch yesterday. “What intrigues them about the jet boat is that it doesn’t chop people up when it backs up to them in the water,” he said. Mr Cummings, now trade commissioner designate to Peking, said French farmers had some stirring ways of making their views known about the import of primary produce. If there was too much foreign wine coming into the country they would put an end to it by “roughing up” a few Italian truck drivers. Too many tomatoes on the Paris market from other countries almost invariably led to the town hall steps of French cities being plastered with tomatoes until the Government halted tomato imports. There were salutary lessons to be learnt from this, Mr Cummings mused. Still renowned

ALFREDO CAMPOLI, who judged the national concerto competition in Christchurch on Saturday, has not “renounced" his claims as a violinist, as implied by a typographical error in Dr C. Foster Browne’s review -of the contest printed on Monday. “The Press” freely concedes that Mr Campoli is still a “renowned violinist” — the phrase used by Dr Browne.